Politics, Leadership and Power

Politics, Leadership and Power

Introduction

The notion of power is one of the fundamental conceptual elements of political theory, yet it remains rather elusive. A great variety of different conceptualizations of power have been suggested by political theorists, yet there is no general agreement on a definition, let alone on a conceptual framework for how to use the term. Although this fact sounds detrimental to political theory's ambition to scientific rigor, there might be something to be learned from it, namely that contested political keywords like power play different roles and have different functions in specific political theories. In the broadest sense and roughly in tune with the use of the term in many everyday contexts, power can be generally described as the capacity to bring about certain effects (Weber, 1958).

Discussion

The Weberian idea that power refers to an actor's capacity to influence or determine another actor's behavior or to carry out his or her will, even against the other's resistance, has been the core of the traditional concept of power, and it has been reformulated in many ways (Weber, 1958). A famous restatement was suggested by Robert Dahl: An actor has power over another to the extent that he (or she) can get her (or him) to do something that she (or he) would not otherwise do. Several characteristics of this usage of the concept of power can be noted. First, it binds power to conscious actors and their intentionality. Second, it explains the efficacy of power on the basis of assumptions about a clear causal relation between two forms of action. Third, the counterfactual assumption treats power as something that gives an external motivation for action to the second actor that might even bring her (or him) to act against her (or his) own original free will. Objections have been raised against all of these assumptions. Why should power be effective only in cases of explicit intentions and expressed wills? Why should power depend on the always fallible knowledge about the effects of an action? Why should power always entail the agonistic moment of the suppression of one will? And finally, for many political theorists it was clear that all of these highly theoretical assumptions pose serious obstacles to an empirical study of power (Wartenberg, 1990).

Before universal suffrage political parties were organized around leadership of various groups of notables, i.e. socially renowned people, influence networks linked by economic, social and political, which met informally to support a politician or a specific group (Scott, 1990). They had ample stable based organizations, and had to win the favor of anonymous electorates. His political operation depended heavily on personal relationships between these men, in a time when women still did not participate in a widespread in politics. Parties were called tables, notables or elite, characterized precisely being organized around party leaders. Importantly, these parties were linked to their parliamentary groups, from which began lobbies emerge stable process described by Ostrogorski for UK and the United States in the late nineteenth ...